The portrait in Doniger’s book on Hindus of the way the brahmin caste took over the yogic tradition and then made the whole thing keyed into the Manu code is very outrageous.

And we can see the same tactics being used in the Gurdjieff legacy, or, rather, by Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky, who wrote a book, please note, on the code of Manu, that spurious piece of crap that has done such immense harm.

It is important to snap out of it and not let this happen to the current civilization. Stop buying into the con-man claims of authority for these people.

It is an unpromising subject, given the contemporary disinformation and the fact that most sufis are themselves victims of this system. As with Gurdjieff the set of lies involved is too much to penetrate.
Good to stay away from it unless you have some real angle on it.
We went through this at length over at Darwiniana in the ‘sillykitty’ period, and the only safe assumption is that self-styled sufi sheiks like e.j. gold are pathological liars. I am not aware of their having uttered a true statement! let alone a statement that is reliable about sufi history.

Gurdjieff shows signs of having ditched ‘sufism’ and moved towards his preoccupations with more ancient spiritual systems. But there again the hidden agenda behind the disinformation makes it a worthless path.
The later point is open to great hostility from followers, but it is a truth known to those who have wasted a few decades to these lies.

We can begin to repursue this question again.
I need to take up the suggestion to get Burton’s book.

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6.6.3 A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra

One of the more notable anti-modern occult conspiracies springs from the shadow Sufistic world, as documented by the reactionary mystic Ouspensky. The Islamic oikoumene generates the remarkable history of so-called Sufism, and this carries a confused legend of the ‘fourth way’ (beyond ways of the body, emotions, or mind) as something deeper than the already complex yogas of the world of Buddhism, whose adherents are world-renouncing, leading to ‘historical termination of its exemplars’, the premonition of realized Man manifesting his full Will as freedom in history. Mathematically, such a being ought to exist, but… The Islamic hides a number of claimants to this category, rarely seen in public. This has nothing to do with Islam. Such a being would be limited from the start by the historical conditioning of his time and place. He would, for example, have no knowledge of modern physics, and live in mystic limbo (not that modern physics is much help here). A real man of will would require independent soul formation, and some objective in time, since he would more likely pass beyond the realm of rebirths, Buddha style. And just this rumor does exist in the corners of Sufistic lore. So we don’t know. Perhaps this man is a myth, his early exemplars poor imitations of themselves, too often ‘rogue buddhas’ wreaking havoc on the eonic sequence with delusive visions. Almost nothing public is known of this, although its possibility is easily deduced in the abstract, nor is its reality visible in recorded history, and yet beginning with Sumer or before these still rare individuals might have begun to emerge, injecting an obscure factor of unseen action in history, as they mediate remarkable initiatives via proxies. We ought to be entirely suspicious of any and all New Age mythologies on this issue, and point out that such individuals are not the ‘secret guides’ of human evolution. The point is that the early era of Sumer might conceal an entire spiritual tradition invisible to us, symmetric to the Indian. This Sufi myth indicates as much. We must be wary of any and all claimants to such a ‘path of will’, mindful of Dante’s systematic codification of devils.

In any case, we see that such beings would be limited to the local knowledge at the stage of civilization they found themselves in, and the Axial Age, given its stupendous scale, could not be the result of spiritual guides leading humanity with prophetic vision. Its scale is too immense, its action mechanized at a level of sophistication that eludes human intelligence. We can barely observe its manifestations, and have no idea what it is, save a ‘force of nature’. Founding a religion via proxies is, however, within their range of such possible types. Note this point and the clear difference of the ersatz religions arising in the wake of the Axial Age, as human realizations. Compared to the Axial scale, Christianity and Islam are different, and show clear ‘initialization’ points. We must remain suspicious of such isolated source points, our ‘floating fourth turning points’, that don’t fit into our sequence (and don’t have to), a good example being precisely the onset of Christianity and Islam themselves, with their unaccountable sudden success without eonic determination, albeit clearly in the wake of the Axial Age. We are missing the background! Our model doesn’t overdetermine history and doesn’t explain the mideonic worlds. The point is that we must stick to what the eonic sequence explains, and be wary of the obscurity of much that happens in between. Tracing diffusion is hard enough with tangible artifacts, in this case it is almost impossible. Thus we have no record of much that is crucial to history, save useless tidbits, such as the strange appearance of Three Magi out of nowhere in the gestation of Christianity. To suggest that Jesus and Muhammad were proxies in such action is unsettling and of course entirely beyond the possibility of current demonstration, and we can’t pursue the issue, save to be wary of the standard histories of these two religions springing form their delimited sources. The odor of occult artifice haunts their traditions.

The idea of the ‘fourth way’ is worthless in its current apocryphal form but suggests its own original meaning, and that, for the future, the conflict of secularism and religion is completely false. If one thinks otherwise, consider Karl Marx. The function of religion, in one sense, to assist the helpless individual in the mechanizations of the state ideology, or civil domination, succumbs to the disease it wishes to cure, and this function is wrested from ‘religion’ by an agent of labor unrest! Quite the religious man! The only real candidate for the fourth way (whose keynote is the ‘religion’ as the ordinary life in civilization) is the rise of secular modernism, escaping the dead end of theocracy. Much in modern life shows the echoing signature of this long lost ‘path of the will’, like a vehicle stuck in first gear.

The Great Freedom Sutra The modern transition has already stolen a march on the classic yogas of antiquity with its seminal discourses of freedom and autonomy, bursting asunder the spurious authority of the gurus. The passage of free men across the abyss of their freedom might prove so simple, yet the die is cast, and man is left to the existential reality of his own self-evolution.

Non other than Kant protests the comprised autonomy of the self mesmerized by religion and demands a ‘religion within the limits of reason’, whose vehicle is the will of the individual. Nothing esoteric here, the simplest of direct pointings to the ‘fourth way’. The right vehicle for this is secular society itself. The catch lies in the deficit between the ideal and the clear reality of the social mechanized state. The ‘fourth way’, civilization itself, has expanded to include all society, and the individual is left to an abstract possibility, one that existed in all stages of civilization. And yet the formulation is surely the right one, granting the result is like paper money, and the need to produce an enzymatic vitamin factor to assist this ocean of floundering wills. The great religions can be of little help here if they degenerate into ideologies. They simply put their adherents in cold storage. The question is one for the future. The apocrophyal ‘fourth way’ can be set aside, and graduate to the philosophies of freedom that emerge so clearly correlated with the modern transition, and whose status is something far more fundamental than anything legislated by the priesthoods of Christianity or the empire projects of prophets.

One of the more suspicious aspects of Gurdjieff’s ‘bluff’ routine (and one shared by a number of New Age gurus) is his ignorance of the subject, mixed with some strange mythological/design arguments in relation to that.
One asks, how does he know all this? And in fact he doesn’t know.

The escalating number of fallacies on all sides of the evolution question have made it a toxic brew, and minefield of dangerous assumptions on the part of dangerous people.

Basically, anyone proceeding through the Gurdjieff world has a right to demur from the totally spurious false authority of these bluffers who can’t afford to be seen as ignorant of such an important reality issue as evolution.

Meanwhile there is Bennett, with his Dramatic Universe. more on that next.

One of the strains of the Gurdjieff corpus is the play of isolated remarks on evolution. Here we confront a tricky question. The issue of Darwinism is one thing, check out Darwiniana, the blog, for a series of critical views of Neo-Darwinism. A critique of Gurdjieff/Ouspensky on evolution is not intended as a plus for standard Neo-Darwinian views.
The views of Gurdjieff here reflect the revolt against Darwinism of Blavatsky and the Theosophists, et al.
But Gurdjieff embroiders this with his own questionable interpretation in terms of the seven stages of man. That rubric sounds convincing on one level, at least to some, but surely ‘evolution’ can’t work that way. The idea of man evolving from man number 1,2,3 to man number 4,5, 6, … is a stilted and cliched formulation that confuses evolution with self-development.

The fault is one inherited from nineteenth century New Agers such as we see in the legacy of Theosophy.

To clarify, the various New Age intrepretations of ‘evolution’ have coopted the word for a different meaning, usually some kind of spiritual development process. But is that ‘evolution’?

The question can’t be answered since the neologism ‘evolution’ appeared in the nineteenth century as a near semantic orphan, one not even used by Darwin in the first edition of his Origin. An earlier usage was ‘transformation’, or ‘transmutation’.

Here confusion arises because of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and the legacy of scientism that it embraces with an overly narrow reductionist view of man. Darwinists correctly point to the fact of evolution in deep time, but their emphasis on natural selection is open to severe challenge.
The various groups in reaction to scientism, and Gurdjieff, and especially Ouspensky, fall into place here, correctly pointed to the failure of scientific reductionism to account for the complexity of human consciousness. But then these groups produced their own confusion, and began to concoct all sorts of myths about the descent of man, almost as unhelpful in reverse as Darwinism.

The nature of the confusion can be seen from the fact, as noted, that ‘evolution’ is a neologism, and that none of the ancient and canonical sutras of yore used the term. It is important to consider this point, since the modern usage of the term ‘evolution’ for spiritual development is a piece of speculative wiseacring, one that can lead to wrong work.
It would have been better to have chosen a different and clearer terminology, e.g. ‘self-realization’, which is a closer match to the usage of antiquity.

To say that people doing yoga are somehow doing ‘evolution’ is a botch of terminology, one that we can’t actually protest very easily, since you can use words as you please.
But the idea arises that New Age style paths are provoking a future evolution of man. We simply cannot be sure of that and it is in fact a doubtful assertion, one that might vitiate the real significance of the classic methods of the development of consciousness.
To be fair, the point is simply unclear, since we don’t know how man evolved, and how he evolved to be able to show the complex potential realizable as indicated by ancient sutric discourses.

Men of developed consciousness are nonetheless not in a position to pontificate on the descent of man, a thoroughly complex mystery as yet unresolved by any party to the debate.
Much more could be said here, but the bad usage that we see in Gurdjieff (as reported by Ouspensky) is highly misleading, and suggests incorrectly that a development of self-awareness is a form of evolution, and that, pace Nietzsche, that ominous figure in the background, self-aware men are to become a sort of ubermensch circuit. It all goes to show that these figures are not all they are cracked up to be.
Men’s self-realization is roughly the same, we suspect, at all stages of his history since the Paleolithic transition (??), and while it is entirely possible that this potential tends to remain hidden or latent, it is doubtful if its realization is a form of evolution. One suspects, given the striking image of the meditating yogis on cylinder seals from before 2000 BCE, that spiritual practices and tantras are very ancient with man. They are a given for man as he is now, not a result of his evolution which is probably static in this set of age periods (the last ten thousand years).

Man’s real evolution in the past is a mystery, and, remarkably, even a figure such as Buddha couldn’t resolve it.

More on this later.
But anyone entangled in the Gurdjieff confusion should realize the abuse of the evolutionary idea here, and its Nietzschean wiseacring at work: an isolated individual who thinks some occult knowledge makes him ‘more evolved’ and somehow a ‘higher being’ then proceeds to wreck the potential of others who have not found that set of states, in the process wreaking havoc with such people.
It is mostly fantasy, and a failure to realize the immense complexity of real evolution, which is not understood by man as yet, and not reducible to the provincial notions of Indic-style yoga practitioners, however significant such aspects of historical culture might be.
Again, it should be noted that the term evolution was not used in antiquity, even if we noted that various forms of Samkhya, for example, come close.
The question of ‘evolution’ is very deep, and the wrong interpretation promoted by Ouspensky, and Gurdjieff, can create endless confusion, and much unfairness and wrong work.

Evolution is better thought of as a species level action in greater nature. The self-realization of individuals in that context is a realization of the potential emerging from that greater evolution.
Gurdjieff does make a significant point, using the wrong language, that ‘evolution’ of consciousness can’t be mechanical, that unconscious evolution can’t be conscious. That sounds plausible, but the language is wrong.
Much of man’s evolution obviously was mechanical, or a complex hybrid of the mechanical and something else.
The point is that while evolution in general might be mechanical the process of self-realization requires self-consciousness, or self-awareness, not just passive awareness, and nature, so far, only brings man to the threshold. The rest is up to him. But to realize this potential is not ‘evolution’. We could certainly hope that some future ‘evolution’ might faciliate the realization of that potential. We have no grounds for saying what that might be like, or what process of nature could perform that. In fact, it is likely that the New Age thinking is a garbled version of the right idea, that man’s future ‘evolution’ must be his own creation. But so far the antics of a figure such as Gurdjieff really don’t foot the bill, and his obvious mistakes throw severe doubt on the authority he proposes for himself.

It is worth checking out both darwiniana.com and the site on the eonic effect, with its considerations of just these questions of macroevolution and self-development.

15.02.09 at 3:29 pm ·
I have been harsh towards Kauffman, but I think he deserves credit for trying to rescue the “God” concept from the Judeo-Christian baggage (for some reason Spinoza didn’t succeed here). Nobody would care if the non-anthropomorphic philosophical concept of the Greeks, Plotinus, etc. had won the day.

If Spinoza didn’t succeed, Kauffman won’t either.
Spinoza is a highly attractive thinker or perspective in the current science/religion confusion, but the confusion travels with the word ‘god’, whatever its usage. And the much maligned Christians at least had a sense of the devil, however confused that is! Don’t get me wrong, I am being partly ironic.

But the god of ‘spinoza’ wil always include the devil, that is an extraordinary blind side to occultism will arise in a Spinozistic science.
In any case, Kauffman’s gesture deserves its moment, you are right, but it will suffer the original fate of Spinozism, witness its fate in the Pantheism debate, in the work of Kant, and then of Hegel.
It always gets snafued.

Anyway, who wants to get religion (‘reinventing the sacred’) from these scientists. They understand nothing and will create even worse confusion than the Christians.
At least Christians have a built in memory and lore of the kind of evil occultism explored on this blog.
Reinventing the sacred can only be done by those who grasp this insidious hidden component to religions like Christianity and Islam.
More to say here, and think about.

Kundabuffer
In what way was “fourth way” teaching “stolen by Gurdjieff”? Did someone else “own” it? From whom did he steal it?
And before you start in on me, I do not now, nor have I ever been a follower of Gurdjieff, his disciples, his teachings, methods, or ideas. All I will claim is that I’ve read a couple of his books, and a few of others involved with him.
I am simply curious about your use of words, as they betray a perception of him, or his work, that I have noticed is starting to crop up all over the place.
From Is there a path?, 2009/02/13 at 11:50 AM

I can’t answer your questions directly, because we don’t know. Isn’t it remarkable that people would devote their lives to something so unclear, and trust those who promote these deliberately vague deceptions?

I am often surprised at the passive acceptance of the Gurdjieff proposition from those who should be skeptical from the start.
After all, as Shirley announces without batting an eyelash in his book on Gurdjieff, referenced last week, Gurdjieff did not even believe in the possibility that many were able to adopt a spiritual path.
I won’t cite the passage in full, but remind those dreaming about a fourth way that no such thing really exists in the sense Gurdjieff spoke of it.

Gurdjieff is way out of line there, and it is important to demand some credentials at that point (if only to expose the lack of such): that is, Gurdjieff speaks without the slightest basis in authority of any kind.
So many are simply mesmerized by a fast talker, but it is important to see how little basis there is for his assertions on all levels. And he lies and lies and embroiders/wiseacres and makes things up.

On what grounds should anyone take this exploitation seriously? Please note the nihilism disguised behind the ‘spiritual path’ baloney: he has rejected the possibility of religion, redemption and salvation.
Thus he is way out of the mainstream, and a crypto-Nietzschean bent on genocidal destructions.
It is a brand of ‘spirituality’ that arises in the degeneracy of Islam and so-called sufism. There are endless numbers of complete idiots in the geographical range of sufism, and Gurdjieff was entangled in a specious concoction of ‘tradititons’ under dry rot in the various ‘paths’ inherited from earlier times.
The problem with the Gurdjieffian cynicism about human potential, is that that potential is universal, and waiting on its realization.
To indulge in right-wing fascism because the ordinary joe isn’t yet awake is a total miscalculation of history. In that sense the rise of modernity,that entity so hated by New Age gurus, is the real ‘fourth way’, in the sense of realizing the human potential for freedom, and much else.
Gurdjieff and his ilk are unable to reconcile themselves to the possibility that history moves on, has left the world of antiquity and its authoritarianism behind, and brought into existence the first civilization that devotes itself to the realization of potential by large numbers of people.

Kauffman’s stance is not surprising: even a modest deviation from Darwinian orthodoxy gets you in trouble.
I am of two minds on his recent Revinventing The Sacred. The ‘Spinoza solution’ makes a lot of sense from one angle, but no sooner do you adopt that than you get into a classic debate, the Pantheism debate at the time of Kant.
Kauffman at least seems to be aware that something is missing in current science but for obvious reasons can’t really say so.